Birdie, a UK-based caretech software-as-a-service maker, has closed a $30 million Series B financing round led by investment firm Sofina, which also includes Omers Ventures and Index Ventures – the latter bolstering its support after leading Birdie’s Series A last year.
Max Parmentier, co-founder and CEO of Birdie, said the latest tranche of funding will scale to continental Europe, where it has begun signing partnerships with local healthcare providers, as well as broader business growth. The new funding brings the total amount raised since its inception in 2017 to $52 million.
In Birdie’s home market in the UK, where it has been operating for about five years, it now works with some 700 healthcare companies whose staff provide “millions” of visits per month to the approximately 35,000 care recipients (and 8,000 family members) supported by its customers — growing 3x since last launch.
The SaaS platform provides caregivers with a suite of digital tools to support their work by streamlining administration and patient management, while enabling real-time visibility into care events — keeping family members informed about important details about their loved one’s care.
Birdie’s broader goal for the company is to use the data it brings in and structures the platform to enable more personalized — and even preventive — healthcare for the social care sector, which is drastically under-resourced to the scale of demand for it. care services.
The sector also suffers from a chronic staff shortage, which is likely to fuel investor interest in financing platforms such as Birdie, which promise to increase efficiencies for healthcare customers.
“We want to become a technology partner for home healthcare in continental Europe, where we know the healthcare sector is under increasing pressure,” Parmentier told australiabusinessblog.com. “We have already signed new partners in Spain and are in advanced discussions with partners in Ireland. In the near future, we want to expand our presence to France, Germany and Scandinavia.”
“Our first priority is to grow our solution so that it can support any caregiver and deliver any type of care at home – from complex care to in-home care, because we want every older adult to be well supported,” he adds.
“We are also constantly learning and adapting to better serve our partners and will be closely monitoring our existing platform to expand its breadth and capabilities. For example, we will launch a new version of our timesheet tool to improve the execution rate which means less commute time and more face-to-face interactions for caregivers and their care recipients.”
Another focus for funding will continue to build partnerships, per Parmentier. “We will continue to develop our open ecosystem to collaborate with healthcare and healthcare providers. Our goal is to invest heavily in building a clinical engine and improving our data analytics capabilities to provide predictive insights.”
When asked how Birdie quantifies the efficiencies for healthcare providers’ targeted customers, he points to a recent survey that found that 73% of users save on average between 7-15 hours a week in daily operations — and also claims the platform offers 9x more insight into daily tasks than other healthcare management software.
“It’s critical because fewer hours of administrative work means more hours to care for the care recipients,” he says.
To quantify the quality of care delivered by users of its platform, the startup has created what it calls as the Birdie Quality Score metric – which takes into account criteria such as alarm response speed, call monitoring and drug monitoring – then feeds the data back to healthcare agencies to help them monitor and improve the care they provide.
Parmentier says this data feedback loop is driving improvements in the service quality of its healthcare partners.
“The aim here is to help them continuously improve the quality of their care. As a result, we see an average of 21% improvement in our partners’ Quality Score within the first six months as a Birdie user, with the biggest improvements within a year; 81% of all issues are resolved within 72 hours and 80% of medication issues are resolved within 72 hours – an increase of 58% within the first month. This is a huge improvement and a testament to the continuous work of the team.”
Parmentier discusses progress on Birdie’s long-term goal to use the healthcare data points fed into the platform to drive a personalized and predictive value-based model for healthcare delivery, and says it has its own ontology for tasks and assessments. has created – “based on a well-known comprehensive geriatric assessment framework”.
“The best part is that we can already see the benefits of this data-driven approach and can validate scientific knowledge with our own data. We use AI models like NLP [natural language processing] to further improve our data analytics capabilities and anticipate health and wellness trends for a care recipient,” he continues.
“Looking ahead, we want to continue to improve our health outcomes while scaling the platform. We can already recommend specific well-being assessments based on data from care recipients, but we want to increase this focus and look at certain condition-specific interventions, such as mobility and mental health.”
“From the outset, our premise has been that a data-driven home care solution can help us deliver personalized care to an aging population. We built Birdie around this concept and are now able to collect millions of data points every day that were previously captured on paper, making us the social care platform with the most structured data,” he adds.
As for the competition, Parmentier says there are plenty of legacy SaaS providers in the healthcare industry — some focused on healthcare assessment, others offering people and operations management tools. But he argues that Birdie’s modern, platforming approach makes it stand out in a crowd.
“Our all-in-one platform uniquely encompasses digital solutions for the entire healthcare industry, and we differentiate ourselves by delivering user-centric products accompanied by a high-quality service approach,” he suggests. “In addition, by working closely with our partners to provide integrated analytics and insights that uncover performance gaps, we are not only streamlining and digitizing many existing processes, but ultimately improving the quality of care they provide.”
Harold Boël, CEO of Sofina, said in a statement regarding Birdie’s Series B: †The home care technology sector seems ripe for an innovative leader like Little bird to catalyze the necessary social change. In line with our strategy to support growing and sustainable businesses, we are excited to join them on their mission to enrich the lives of millions of older adults through preventive and personalized care at home.”
“What does it really matter Little bird separately, the combination of an intuitive product experience is coupled with a true partnership approach to digital transformation,” added Stéphane Kurgan, venture partner at Index, in another supporting statement. “We continue to be impressed by the team’s passion, caliber and commitment to social change and are proud to guide them in their quest to reinvent healthcare.”
